It adds new capabilities to Plutus, the platform that developers use to write Cardano smart contracts, unifying the built-in features available in all three versions of the platform so that older applications get newer features.
The update also tightens several of the ledger’s validation rules, including one that ensures that two stakeholders cannot reuse the same cryptographic identity key.
“In addition to improvements to Plutus and the Plutus cost model, this update lays the groundwork for the next update, the Dijkstra era hard fork, which will introduce Ouroboros Leios to Cardano,” Input Output wrote in a development report on Friday.
Ouroboros Leios is a scaling proposal for the proof-of-stake consensus model that Cardano runs. Expected by the end of 2026, it aims to significantly increase transactions per second without weakening the protocol’s security guarantees.
Van Rossem is the procedural foundation for Ouroboros, both in the ledger changes he submits and the precedent he sets: that Cardano can now be improved by voting.
The hard fork is named after Max van Rossem, a Cardano governance contributor who helped shape the network’s constitution and died in October 2025.
What the hard fork means for a Cardano user
There are no changes visible to someone who casually has or spends ADA. Transactions work the same, wallets do not need to be updated and the fee for sending ADA does not change. The update does not alter the look or feel of the network.
